Dave

This one was tough to nail down. At times briskly paced, other times downright glacial. I almost gave up on this book a number of times and put it aside to read others.

The Yennifer stuff was basically a large exposition and lore dump and I felt every second of it. The last chapter was very strong, though, tying everything together.

It's hard to really live up to the first Hyperion book, because, in a way, Hyperion was a nearly flawless book. Hyperion was chock full of stuff for lit nerds and scifi nerds alike, while establishing a few great characters that you found yourself caring about after thinking how much you couldn't stand them early on. The Fall of Hyperion picks up where Hyperion left off, but ditches the Canterbury Tales formatting for a multi-narrative style that jumps between first person for “John Keats” and third for everyone else.

Each character has their redeeming qualities as well as their downfalls, which is what helps to make these books so great, but I know I can't be the only one who was a bit disappointed by the ending. Maybe I'm just a sadist, but the fact that Simmons chose to “save” most of these characters was disappointing. It felt like he wanted to just continue on their stories forever. A good portion of the end of the book felt like him warping everything to ensure that everyone would be as happy as they could be.

Simmons remains a great writer with an incredible sense of plotting and characterization, I just think that he got too attached.

Four books deep into the Expanse series and the ideas are all coming together and the depth of this universe is really starting to sink in. The duo known as James SA Corey have truly created something special in this series, although there were things about Cibola Burn that didn't quite click as well as the past books in the series.

The first thing is the characters that were introduced in this book were not exactly great. They weren't bad, but we've kind of reached a point where the readers are all so invested in Holden, Naomi, Amos and Alex that it's natural to want to see more of them.

Mix in the fact that there were characters introduced in the second and third books that deserve another spin (Chrisjen, Bobbie, Anna, etc.). From what we can tell, we'll probably get back into their heads in the fifth installment, which is cool, but in Cibola Burn in particular the characters really felt like they were there just to bring the reader to the crew of the Rocinante to keep them front and center.

Each character had their strengths, for sure. It was nice to get some time with Havelock considering that Miller is still floating around as a servant of the protomolecule, but Elvi and Basia had a glimmer of hope of being interesting but tended to fall a bit flat and served just to end up being links to the crew. This brings up a point that I've seen floating around that if they are going to simply create characters whose sole purpose is to help us keep tabs on the crew, why not just get inside of the crew?

It feels late to get POVs from Amos, Naomi and Alex, but Elvi and Basia were good characters that could have been a lot better if we didn't have to inhabit their thoughts. Murtry – our villain – border-lined on ridiculous at times in how dastardly and uncaring he was. While I understand that he's supposed to be a counterpoint to Holden, his motivations were so over-the-top and thin at times that he fell flat. A lot of that probably had to do with how fleshed out Melba was before or even the evil corporations we've had in the past.

RCE didn't feel like an evil monolith, which is good, but Murtry was almost trying to make them into one, which was weird.

The general premise was solid, because we saw what the protomolecule did to the worlds that it inhabited through the gates, hinting that Earth was destined to be one of these thousand worlds reachable by gate to be strip-mined for resources, but it never got that far due to the mysterious alien power that caused the creators of the protomolecule to shut down the gates. We also saw how ridiculous humanity can be in drawing lines in the sand as well as the challenges of humanity expanding to other worlds.

Of course, a lot of what happened in this book felt almost like it was jammed in there to make for a full length novel, with the weird side plots. I'm talking about killer slugs, blinding rain, natural disasters and ships falling out of orbit. They all demonstrated what could and probably will go wrong on these planets that are accessible via the gates, but we were approaching biblical plague levels of fatigue here.

Still absolutely a fun book and I'm looking forward to the rest, but probably the weakest of the bunch. They can't all be winners and I'm okay with that.

This was perhaps as mediocre as it could be. The pacing was kinda dreadful, most of the plot and characters were sorta forgettable or I could only envision them thanks to the game.

I understand that writers have restrictions on them when working on tie-in novels and not to expect much, but yikes.

Closer to a 2 1/2 than 3.

I gotta admit, early into this I wasn't feeling it.

There's something about an introduction into a new sci-fi universe that can be daunting, if not downright grating. A lot of modern sci-fi can be really good but fail in the opening chapters of creating a setting/world/universe that the reader can feel and get a grasp on. A mental image.

This was definitely one of those cases. I continued to read out of obligation to the book and I was ultimately happy I did.

This was enjoyable and flew by. I'll definitely keep reading.

Parts of this book feel unique and interesting, while others are a slog and sort of a mess. For a 200 page book that is sort of weird.

The middle section dragged like no one's business, which just solidifies that while the premise for the book is interesting, it doesn't exactly have enough legs to stand as a novel.

Lloyd feels like a caricature of a crazy person, with nothing but his insanity on display ever. I found myself questioning why anyone would believe anything he said, no matter the grief they were experiencing.

There were also some timeline issues where things felt like they happened more spaced out than they really did.

How do you take a very well written book with fantastic worldbuilding and great underlying concepts and bog it down? You whiff it on the plotting.

This is a well written, well researched book where so much thought went into building a realistic world, dripping with style and grime, and everything just works, that the plot remained on the backburner the entire time.

By the time we're in the final act of the story, it was almost like the author remembered “shit, this has to be going somewhere!” So it's a mad dash back to something from earlier in the book, then clumsily linking it to the middle of the book and viola, plot! I do this thing where I read through Goodreads reviews to get a feeling for what other readers are saying about a book, and once I slog through the bold text, GIFs and whatnot, it seems like I'm not the only one who noticed this. Some are far more forgiving and claim it was the intent, but ehh.

Writers can feel intent and when a plot is being rushed or cobbled together. Beukes was so immersed in this world she created that there was a struggle to give us a reason to be here, with these characters, in this setting. There are plenty of novels where they diverge from the original path, go off on side tangents and feel like they lose the plot completely, but they're also oozing with intent.

There were many subplots presented in the book that could've been the main plot, in fact, and it would've been a stronger book. Her boyfriend's whole plot? That was super interesting! Her sketchy job plot? That was interesting, too! Her ex the tabloid journo? That was pretty interesting! Instead, it turned to a throwaway set of antagonistic characters from one of the subplots and chose that as the hill to die on.

None of those characters were that fleshed out and while the last few chapters were exciting and well-written, there was this feel of an editor's hand (or many!) at play saying “Lauren, we need there to be a plot here.”

Trust me, I've done this before.

I don't have a ton to say about this except it was a strange omission from my reading history.

It really could end no other way. I gotta say, a lot of the reviews of this book made it sound like it was rife with problems, or that it mistreated characters or their motivations.

I don't see that at all. In fact, Sapkowski has been experimenting with form and narrative throughout the series and finally executed his vision with a deft hand. Some of his books suffer from strange time jumps, moving to new narrators or a new narrative style. This one did a lot of that but it kept its momentum.

He absolutely did right by his characters and found a way to weave the concepts he toyed with throughout without taking a cheap way out.

NK Jemisin is the best working writer alive today. I'm not sure what else to say.

I gotta say, I have a soft spot for this character and this series.

I grew up reading a lot of science fiction and the Star Wars Expanded Universe was an integral part to that. Yeah, they weren't big, lofty and difficult tomes, but they were fun. Those books did more to flesh out and make the Star Wars universe feel real than any of the movies or official books ever have.

So getting to dip back into Thrawn? Awesome, just awesome. Zahn is a master of pacing these books, building compelling characters and making sure that you, the reader, enjoy yourself.

There's a lot to say about this book.

The pacing can ebb and flow at times, from glacial and obsessed with staying in the muck of world building to flying by. Bas-Lag is full of strange characters and diverse races of people, with New Crobuzan a converging point for most of them.

There's a lot of metaphor mixed into this book, from beasts used to create recreational drugs that are uncontrollable monsters that feast on your dreams and leave you braindead to create their drug (and profit for whomever can control them) to the thuggish, fascist police force and government. It's evident that this book is deeply immersed in leftist theory, with there being analogs between the different forces of the Weaver, Construct Council and even fRemade with Jack Half-a-Prayer, and different leftist schools of thought, like Anarchism, Marxist-Leninism, Maoism and pure Marxism. Extraordinary events brings these forces together, but only temporarily.

The slake-moths are... the most terrifying fictional creation I've read since the Shrike from the Hyperion books.

The world is rich and the city is disgusting. I've read a lot of complaints about this book, about the prose being “purple” and the overuse of the word “ichor,” which is really funny. There's definitely places where the story drags but when everything worked it was brilliant and the sagging middle parts are forgotten.

How I came upon this book was under awful circumstances a few years ago, which might add to my complete and utter disdain for the book. Wait, maybe it was the plotting, characters and premise that caused that, I'm not sure. I was stuck in Chicago O'Hare a few years ago in a layover gone awry situation, forced on standby the next morning.

For some reason I decided that spending money on a hotel was completely out of the question, so I chose to spend the night in the terminal with nothing but my backpack as comfort. I had run out of reading material and this was well before the advent of smart phones, so my conundrum was to go into the airport bookstore and pick just about anything to keep me from going stir crazy or spend the entire night roaming the halls of the terminal and fighting off exhaustion.

Maybe it was the idea that it was “based upon” the Divine Comedy that made me think that somehow this could be interesting, but the reality was downright depressing. What it did accomplish is that it kept me warding off temporary insanity while the overnight staff vacuumed around me before I landed at home and left it for safe keeping in the nearest garbage can.

This book was angling to be an all-timer with it's pacing and the genuine joy it brought with each passing page. The biggest problem with these books tends to be that they lose steam and, sure enough, this one did.

Ciri's story is great but the story being told from this many perspectives breaks up the narrative almost too much and slowed down the last act a lot.

Sometimes a struggle to get through, but always pulls you back.

I really enjoyed this. This is a book heavy on themes and light on plot, but the imagery is amazing and it's an interesting book.

If you're launching books into KU, this can be helpful.

There's always that sense of excitement when Silvia Moreno-Garcia has a new book coming out. In part, it's because you know you're in for something that has her signature style, but will not be retreading on territory covered in previous books. For the most part.

Silver Nitrate is a marvelous supernatural book set in Mexico in the 80s, focusing on their film and television industry. We follow Montserrat, an audio editor for a local film house, and Tristan, a disgraced telenovela star who's scarred up face has him doing voiceover work instead of being the leading man he was. Their shared love of campy horror flicks and a chance encounter with a retired local horror director, Abel, leads them down a dark path of helping him complete one of his lost films that's kept on rare (and volatile) silver nitrate stock.

Of course, Abel was working on the film with a former Nazi occultist who'd embedded spells in the film, and his untimely death left the spell chain broken, which Abel felt led to the end of his career and a string of bad luck. When Montserrat and Tristan promise to help finish by providing voiceover for the film and help complete the spells, their luck changes for a brief period before, well... as one of Abel's former friends Jose puts it, they set off a magical nuclear bomb and played right into that Nazi's hands of looking for immortality.

There's a lot of love put into this novel, with a focus on old horror flicks and Mexico's film scene and tons of occult stuff. Lots of research went into making sure everything felt right, and it shows. Much like Velvet Was the Night, this book is dripping with style, tension and is a joy to read. I found myself not reading too much at a time for the explicit purpose of not wanting to finish it too quickly, which is always a good sign.

Moreno-Garcia has a rare talent for making immensely readable books that still pack deep thematic elements for those willing to look beyond the well-crafted plots.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

Re-read.

Probably the best in the series so far. I had started this before but stopped about halfway through when I grew tired of GRRM's tendency to simply use the death of one of his plentiful main characters to move the plot along. That being said, I did come back to this one and did enjoy the book, but simply needed time away from GRRM's world since reading the first two in quick succession and half of the third as such.

This is a book that is almost impossible to review.

It's full of imagination and good concepts, which is evident by how influential it has been, but there's just something about this book that didn't fully click for me. The narrative jumps back-and-forth between characters through the lead character jumping heads, so-to-speak. There are a lot of “tech” concepts in the book that Gibson sort of just made up.

I remember reading in an interview that he had zero understanding of the tech involved (because this was before commercial internet, some of this stuff still existed, though) and decided to wing it. Like most good science fiction, though, he was able to project what he thought humans in the future would create and... he wasn't entirely wrong, was he? My biggest holdup is that the lead character, Case, doesn't really have much going for him. Because you're jumping between himself, a construct of himself and Molly's consciousness, the reader ends up only getting to know most of the characters on the surface level.

While Case may have some connection with Linda, it's hard to visualize it since we see so little of it and get only a broad sense of how Case feels about her. He seems more engrossed in the mysterious Molly.

Essentially, this novel gets caught up in the concepts, imagery and how cool it is while making some sacrifices when it comes to narrative clarity and creating fleshed out characters.

I very much enjoyed Leviathan Wakes, but found it to be a bit troubling at times. Mostly that Holden and Miller were just so close together as characters and while they may have had different beliefs, they were very similar characters no matter what.

Caliban's War addressed that issue and added in a whole slew of main characters that really brought something different to the table. We still got to follow Holden around while he tilted at windmills, but we saw events unfold from a few different points of view, which really added to the overall experience.

While the last book was exciting, this one was a lot harder to put down after I grew familiar with the cast of characters. There was, of course, a grand convergence between the main characters but it didn't feel forced, it felt welcome.

The story was well-crafted and I was legitimately excited to see what happened next when I got to the end of the book without feeling like anything was forced or ridiculous. Sure, there might not be a lot of “hard science” as to what exactly is going on, but that rarely gets in the way of enjoying the book.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is one of those books that really has some moments that are hard to shake. Some of the stuff Manny goes through is tough to read, as he's a well-written, rounded character you grow to care about in short order.

Following a queer boy on the run from his religious upbringing and coping with a transient life that's full of compromises no one should have to make. The writing is fluid and smooth, to the point where you almost forget you're reading about some pretty horrific stuff.

I enjoyed this one. The shift near the end was something, although it did feel sort of abrupt, but overall, this was a book worth checking out.

This is one of those books that I know I'll be reading multiple times and that leaving a conventional “review” for won't be possible.

The Passenger is presented through two different, alternating vantage points. First is through the hallucinations of Alicia, a certified genius in math, violins and a great deal of theoretical things. The other is Bobby Western, the brother of Alicia and, while smart in his own right, could never quite live up to his little sister. That didn't matter to him, though, because he loved his little sister. When I say loved, I don't mean sibling-wise; I mean... yeah. There are vague allusions to a quasi wedding ceremony, malformed babies and the hurt his family suffered because of all of this.

If this was the path of inciting incidents that led to Alicia checking herself into therapy, where she received shock treatments and hallucinated the Thalidomide Kid, almost described like a penguin, who would interrogate Alicia, berate her, and bring about a cast of crude “entertainers” to keep her company.

Bobby sees the Thalidomide Kid once when he closed himself up in a shack by the beach.

If you want to, you could read deeper into a lot of this, including McCarthy's use of language and his own reading into the Kekule Problem. McCarthy isn't a normal guy. He's one of the most acclaimed American authors and he can waltz into the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank where he's spent a lot of his recent years pondering language, mathematics and philosophy. This book is well researched, delving into complex mathematic theories, other times the Kennedy Assassination or the history of the atomic bombs. Western's dad was one of the creators of the atomic bomb, and his papers were stolen while Bobby was “away” after an accident.

It's understanding these things that helps to unravel what this book is. There's a plane crash at the beginning and Bobby is a salvage diver, working with a motley crew of rejects to take whatever job comes their way. One of those jobs is this crash, and there's a missing body, black box and no sign of forced entry. After this, things just seem to keep getting more complicated and worse.

We learn Bobby found a small fortune in vintage coins stuffed into pipes in the concrete foundation of his grandparents' old home. Alicia and he split that fortune, with Alicia buying a very expensive violin with her half, and Bobby buying a sports car and trotting around the globe doing various things, including being a pretty good race car driver. But what Bobby can't shake is that Alicia killed herself. She was always the smarter one, but she was also the active one.

She had checked herself into the asylum, had always known what she wanted to do, what she wanted to be. She was sought after by violin collectors to give the history and math behind antique violins. Everything about Alicia was active while Bobby drifted around, unsure of himself or his life. There's something here about Bobby's parents and their link to the atomic bombs and the sin that comes with being the offspring of such an atrocity.

The feds are after Bobby. On the surface it's about tax evasion, but there's something deeper here at play. Is Bobby the missing body from the aircraft at the beginning? Did Bobby ever really wake up after his accident and his mind is playing through his own guilt in a much more straightforward way than Alicia did?

One key here is perhaps the Thalidomide Kid himself. Thalidomide was a drug used in the 50s and 60s for pregnant women to help with morning sickness, and the results were horrific. It led to limb and liver deformities in babies that were born, or it led to miscarriages. Their limbs would resemble flippers.

Bobby encounters a host of different characters from his diving buddies, most of which meet untimely ends, to bar friends and even the glamorous trans stripper, Debbie. Debbie feels like something more, especially considering when it comes down to it, she's who Bobby trusts the most. The feds are doing everything in their power to strip Bobby's identity away from him, to where he feels like he needs to take a new identity at the hands of a lawyer he found in the phone book and has had a series of metaphysical conversations with at a mobster restaurant, and Debbie is his choice of confidant before he leaves.

Can you live your life if the past is anchored to your ankles and dragging you down? Most of his diving friends are listless and afraid of letting go of something, and their ends are not poetic. Be it living in a run-down shack shooting roaches, drowning on a job or having a lifestyle catch up, each one gave Bobby insight into what his life could be, but he can't quite accept any of them.

This is a dense, interesting, frustrating and at times very funny book that I know I'm gonna re-visit soon. It also means I need to read Stella Maris, then re-evaluate this one. I'm glad we got this book.

This book was... Sort of a slog to get through?

Some of Hammett's other books (you know the ones) are iconic and definitely worth reading. Red Harvest? I'm not so sure. He plays around with this idea of the hardboiled detective and the allure for most reviewers and advocates for the book seems to be that it's “really hardboiled,” which I guess just means insanely violent?

Detective shows up to a small city riddled with crime and corruption, gets hired by one of the people who made it that way to ‘clean it up,' and finds himself becoming the driver of endless violence and death. He worries about himself starting to enjoy it and things are only resolved in a sense that he got blackout drunk/stoned and didn't kill the woman he sorta liked?

With quite literally almost 100 years of distance from when this book was released, this trope of someone pitting the baddies against each other to survive being done a lot (better in some cases) since then, plus reading it with modern sensibilities, this book is just eh. The protagonist wasn't super likeable and served more as a vehicle to get from action scene to action scene. He served as the audiences eyes and ears for the spectacle of endless car chases, gun fights, brawls and heists.

There were what I'd call “third act issues” in this, as well, where it just felt like it dragged and whatever the actual plot was seemed muddy and lost in all of the blood. If your idea of “hardboiled” is not just an antihero, but one that doesn't seem to exist outside of his violence and nothing but nonstop destruction it's the book for you. If you're looking for the antihero and violence with something more in it, this'll probably not be the book for you.

A lot of good stories, with the first few being the most powerful.